Jeanne was seven years old when the bombing of Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into World War II. The Wakatsukis, their lives interrupted during a post-Depression upsurge in family finances, were among the first to be questioned and detained. FBI agents confronted Ko with photos of barrels of fish bait and accused him of supplying oil to enemy submarines. Although the charge was unfounded in a court of law, he spent nine months apart from his clan in a Bismarck, North Dakota, prison. During his imprisonment, in April 1942 his wife and son Woody assumed responsibility for resettling the family in Block 16 of Manzanar, an austere, barbed-wire enclosed, mile-square internment camp near Lone Pine, California, 4,000 feet above sea level in the shadow of Mount Whitney.
From her early memories of Mama, Papa, Woody, brother Kiyo, sister May, sister-in-law Chizu, and others came the book Farewell to Manzanar (1973), a retelling of Jeanne's girlhood traumas and dreams in the milieu of an artificial Japanese-American city, the largest metropolis (10,000 Japanese Americans) between Reno and Los Angeles. She recalls the experience as a yellow blur of "stinging whirlwinds and fierce duststorms that pricked the skin like needles and coated everything, including our lips and eyelashes, with thick ochre powder."
Amid rows of dreary barracks, functional mess halls and latrines, and intimidating gatehouses and fences, she and her peers lived out a semblance of normality, singing in the glee club, acting in school plays, enjoying the taste of her first snowflake, and wondering how the inflamed white populace would accept them when Japanese Americans were finally released from custody. She recalled later a major source of comfort: she discovered an abandoned box of books in a firebreak and escaped camp misery through Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, Nancy Drew mysteries, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking series, and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
